Several authors, including Stephen Law in this journal, have argued that the case for an evil God is (about) as strong as for a good God. In this article I take up the challenge on behalf of theists who, like Richard Swinburne, argue for an agent of unrestricted power and knowledge as the ultimate explanation of all contingent truths. I shall argue that an evil God is much less probable than a good one. I do so by (1) distinguishing the analogical predication of ‘good’ or ‘evil’ of God from the literal predication, (2) interpreting ‘acting in a morally good way’ to mean ‘acting like a good consequentialist’, and (3) relying on an axiarchist thesis about agency that is congenial to theists and perhaps even presupposed by theism.

This article seeks to advance a Thomistic metaphysics of creation in light of certain claims made by Stephen Hawking on the beginninglessness of the universe. I start with an exploration of Hawking's proposal that a beginningless universe entails an uncreated universe. This propels me into Aquinas's contention that a created beginningless universe is indeed possible, and thence I consider the metaphysics behind Thomas's position in this regard. Given this metaphysics of creation, I contend that there follow some interesting conclusions with regard to our notion of a creator God and the means for establishing the existence of such.

Can any being worthy of worship make others worship it? I think not. By way of an analogy to love, I argue that it is perfectly coherent to think that one could be made to worship. However, forcing someone to worship violates their autonomy, not because worship must be freely given, but because forced worship would be inauthentic – much like love earned through potions. For this reason, I argue that one cannot be made to worship a fitting object; forced worship would be unfitting. My principal claim is that no being worthy of worship could exercise the power to make others worship it, since the act of making another worship would necessarily make one unworthy of worship.

In a recent article Mark Ian Thomas Robson argues that there is a clear contradiction between the view that possible worlds are a part of God's nature and the theologically pivotal, but philosophically neglected, claim that God is perfectly beautiful. In this article I show that Robson's argument depends on several key assumptions that he fails to justify and as such that there is reason to doubt the soundness of his argument. I also demonstrate that if Robson's argument were sound then this would be a problem for all classical theists and not just those who hold the possible worlds view.

This article argues that – despite the value of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in a contingent and relative sense – there is no fundamental insider–outsider problem. We distinguish weak and strong versions of ‘insiderism’ (privileged versus monopolistic access to knowledge) and then sociological and religious versions of the latter. After reviewing critiques of the sociological version, we offer a holistic semantic critique of the religious version (i.e. the view that religious experience and/or language offers sui generis access to knowledge). We argue that all evidence for mental states is overt, public, and observable, and, hence, that there can be no significant difference in the access to knowledge of insiders and outsiders.

This essay presents a theistic account of deontic properties that can lay claim to many of the advantages of divine command theory but which avoids its flaws. The account, divine attitude theory, asserts that moral properties should be understood in terms of divine attitudes, such that an action is morally wrong just in case God would be displeased with the performance of that action. Among the virtues of this account is its ability to explain the modal status of fundamental moral truths, something that divine command theory cannot do.

As a member of the Victorian-era Metaphysical Society, W. K. Clifford contributed to debate about the prospects for morality in the absence of religion. Clifford thought its chances good. He presented a paper offering a ‘scientific’ approach to moral theory. In my discussion, I explore his proposal, using it to gain interpretative leverage on a paper he delivered before the Society only a year later, ‘The ethics of belief’. I set aside the quarrel with religion so prominent in this influential essay and discount its evidentialist epistemology, the better to reveal it for what it is: a powerful exercise in moral suasion.

Richard Beardsmore once argued that, although it is possible for atheists and religious believers alike to regard life as a gift, the regarding of one's own death as a gift is open only to the (Christian) believer. I discuss this interesting contention, and argue that, notwithstanding some important differences between the attitudinal possibilities available to atheists and believers in God, there are at least three senses in which an atheist could regard death as a gift. Two of these involve death's being conceived as serving some particular purpose, whereas the third derives from a more pervasive affirmatory attitude to life as a whole.

The article engages with two contemporary understandings of Schleiermacher's notion of feeling which are in important aspects in conflict: a social understanding (Kevin W. Hector and Christine Helmer) and an existential-mystical understanding (Thandeka). Using the phenomenological category of ‘existential feelings’ drawn from the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, I argue that they can be brought into a coherent overall account that recognizes different aspects of feeling in Schleiermacher's work. I also suggest that such an interpretation of Schleiermacher's concept of religious feeling offers a different and better understanding of the role of feelings in religious experience and belief than the contemporary ‘perception-model’ of religious experience.

This article is an evaluation of Le Poidevin's use of Carnap's stance on ontology within the philosophy of religion. Le Poidevin claims that (1) theists need to take God to be a putative entity within space-time in order for their claim that God exists to be meaningful, and that (2) instrumentalism about theology is viable. I argue that although Le Poidevin's response to Carnap's argument is no less problematic than that argument itself, his position is in fact thoroughly un-Carnapian. The upshot is that his discussion provides some support to atheism, but none to either of his two official conclusions.

In this article I object to Le Poidevin's (2009) contention that relative identity is beset with an infinite metaphysical regress. I argue, first, that since Le Poidevin's regress argument presupposes a direct theory of reference, it does not apply to accounts of relative identity which reject this account of reference. I argue, second, that Le Poidevin's regress is not inevitable for one who accepts a direct account of reference, since it does not apply to the formal logic of relative identity which van Inwagen uses to articulate and defend the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Evidential atheism, as espoused by various philosophical atheists, recommends belief that God does not exist on the basis of not just the evidence of which we are aware, but also our overall available evidence. This article identifies a widely neglected problem from potential surprise evidence that undermines an attempt to give a cogent justification of such evidential atheism. In addition, it contends that evidential agnosticism fares better than evidential atheism relative to this neglected problem, and that traditional monotheism has evidential resources, unavailable to evidential atheism, which promise to save it from the fate of evidential atheism.

An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this article we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence.

In this article I highlight a tension between Alston's core thesis in his seminal book Perceiving God – that beliefs about God formed on the basis of mystical perception are prima facie justified – and a currently popular method for disarming a certain form of the argument from evil, a method which involves adopting a view known as sceptical theism.